Reviews for Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

The average rating for Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-07 00:00:00 Joseph Lavecchia Do any of us die having said everything we wanted to say? Or having said everything that needed to be said? Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, certainly did not. When he died in 1910 he left behind a substantial cache of notebooks, letters, and unfinished manuscripts, much of which turned out to be a treasure trove of brilliant satirical and existential prose. Herein lies the problem. How do you publish what amounts to be three pages of notes here, eighteen pages of an incomplete essay there, twenty six pages of an unfinished story over there, in a coherent, logical, related format? You can't. What you do is what Bernard DeVoto has done; you combine a selection of the best bits, annotate it with explanatory footnotes, and send it out into the world. "If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, HE has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it the whole time. When exasperated men rise up and sweep away an age-long tyranny and set a nation free, the first thing the delighted pulpit does is to advertise it as God's work, and invite people to get down on their knees and pour out their thanks to him for it." I'm more impressed with Twain than ever before. His satire was as sharp as any written today, and it's no big surprise that his publishers fought hard to keep so much of this out of the public eye. It wasn't until decades after his passing that Letters from the Earth saw the light of day. "If [God] had had a motto, it would have read, 'Let no innocent person escape.' You remember what he did in the time of the flood. There were multitudes and multitudes of tiny little children, and he knew they had never done him any harm; but their relations had, and that was enough for him: he saw the wild terror in their eyes, he saw that agony of appeal in the mothers' faces which would have touched any heart but his, but he was after the guiltless particularly, and he drowned those poor little chaps." Not all of Letters is so biblically condescending. If blasphemy isn't your thing, there's an irreverent slight on Britain's Prince Albert. Or how about a short story on the fallacious faculties of felines? Whatever your particular taste, there is surely something here that you can engage with, that will broaden your perspective and, just maybe, challenge your preconceptions about one of America's most beloved writers. *PERSONAL NOTE: This being my 100th "review" on GoodReads, I looked up some interesting (and kinda' sad) statistics... •21 (21%) of my "reviews" have 0 views. •My most popular "review" is the short blurb I wrote about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. •My least popular "review" - according to whatever algorithm GoodReads employs - is on The Man of Bronze by Kenneth Robeson.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-25 00:00:00 Renee Vanderveen Satan's letters written during a visit to Earth, this is Mark Twain at his most cynical and offensive. This is a far cry from C.S. Lewis, perhaps even a Bizarro reflection. Long before today's crop of posturing, pompous-ass religious critics, Twain did it better, faster and funnier. For those who like their humor dark as unsweetened cocoa.